Imagination Technologies' Yassaie: 'What we need is a Beckham for the industry'

When Hossein Yassaie arrived in Britain in the mid-1970s, he planned to get
his degree and get out. But while the Iranian chief executive of Imagination
Technologies might not have been born in this country, he has certainly
adopted it as his home.

Back in 1998, Imagination was ridiculed for piling investment into mobile phone graphics - now its technology is used in the iPhone.

"I prefer living in the UK more than anywhere else. I like the history, I like the culture, I like the under-dog attitude," he explains. "The UK is a good place to get things done."

Mr Yassaie's eyes light up as he waxes lyrical about Britain's successes in technology and his commitment to building up Imagination's research and development facilities in the UK – notably at its new headquarters in Kings Langley, Hertfordshire.

But there is one big problem standing in his way: those pesky overseas students who do just as Mr Yassaie planned to, by coming to Britain, getting their degrees and then taking their highly educated brains back home.

"It is very important that we are able to hire the workforce we need from within the UK and that really is a challenge. Partly because the universities don't necessarily teach the right things, and partly because you don't get enough home students," he says.

"At British universities, 85pc or 90pc of the [postgraduate] students are from overseas. Only 10pc are British. That is a problem and it has to be fixed.

"We need those engineers in the UK to help create the future. If we don't [start educating more UK citizens] we will be forced to set up offices elsewhere."

Imagination, which is best known for Pure digital radios and its graphics technology, used in Apple's iPhone, is on a mission to recruit 200 UK staff this year. Of those, about 100 will be new graduate positions.

However, the dearth of good candidates means the company has had to expand its research and development centres in India and Poland to help it keep up with demand, and is hitting the acquisitions trail as a way of simply buying up engineers.

Imagination has also launched a university and school outreach programme, headed by Mr Yassaie's computer science graduate daughter, aimed at inspiring students early on.

"Britain is impacting the technology industry, big time, but it's all under the hood," he says, referring to companies like his own, or Cambridge's ARM Holdings, which design the chips that power the mobiles, tablets and games consoles produced by the likes of Apple or Samsung.

"We are not consumer brands so a lot of people don't understand that the gear they buy has a lot of British technology inside. Part of the challenge is about making it cool, making sure people understand what we do. What we need is a rock star for the industry," he says.

"In the UK, people get excited by what they see – The X Factor or football. David Beckham is a big deal [in inspiring young people] but we don't have an equivalent for British technology."

What about Mike Lynch, the founder of Autonomy, who last year managed to sell the British software company to Hewlett Packard for a whopping $10bn (£6.3bn)?

"But he sold out!" Mr Yassaie jokes.

In truth, Mr Yassaie thinks it is inspiring that companies like Autonomy can command those sums of money, and bridles at what he claims is a British habit of doing down our winners.

"You go to the US and they are maybe over the top about success, but in the UK success is not communicated as a positive thing. Even something positive has a sting in the tail," he says.

In keeping with this, he thinks Instagram, the photo app company which Facebook snapped up last week for $1bn, is probably decent value at the price. Never mind that it only has 13 members of staff and virtually no revenues.

However, Mr Yassaie has been eager to fend off any takeover of Imagination. It looked likely a couple of years ago until Intel and Apple – two of its biggest customers – amassed sizable stakes. Today they control 14.5pc and 8.7pc of the business respectively.

"It's a signal to everyone - don't even try and bother. I think the best thing for us is to be independent," he says.

But without the prospect of a sale in the offing, Mr Yassaie would like to find new ways of incentivising his staff - and for the UK as a whole to encourage the next wave of entrepreneurs.

He would like to see the reintroduction of "taper relief", a scheme abolished by the last government, which ratchets the capital gains tax on shares downwards, according to how long an individual has owned them.

"At the moment, shares are so heavily taxed that their value as an incentive is not as strong as it should be. When people stay in a company for a longer number of years, they should get more out of it," he says. "[Reintroducing the taper] would stop people leaving the UK and going elsewhere."

Mr Yassaie has a long to-do list for the Government - and he is not stopping there - but he has faith that Messrs Cameron, Clegg and Osborne will take heed.

After decades of lip service and little action, the says, the Government is finally starting to take notice of the technology sector in this country, and its potential for driving economic recovery.

"I call a spade a spade. In my view, this Government has done a lot of good stuff. I am much more impressed with this one than the previous government because they seem to be engaged, they listen. They've had a huge recession on their plate to deal with, but once this is settled, I think they should be putting these things on the agenda."

As for Imagination's own to-do list, Mr Yassaie is firmly focused on tapping the next big technology trend.

Back in 1998, the company was ridiculed for piling investment into mobile phone graphics because people didn't believe they would ever have enough pixels to warrant any sort of sophistication. Today, the old-school Nokia handset has been toppled off its perch and Apple has become the biggest company in the world, largely thanks to its products' visual capabilities.

After that, came touch screens. Mr Yassaie recalls recently watching a child reaching out to touch a television display and becoming frustrated when the graphics wouldn't move.

"I just sat there and thought to myself, what have you done? But it's a good thing. Children find this really easy to work with."

So what's the next stop – the next ground-breaking technology to change human behaviour?

"Television walls", is Mr Yassaie's unblinking reply. The introduction of new screens with many times the current number of pixels will enable people to turn whole sides of their houses into interactive screens, he says, perhaps with their social networking accounts "live" alongside video phones and television content all day long.

To many, it might sound like a nightmare, but for Mr Yassaie it is purely exciting.

His task now is to get Britain's school children feeling the same.

CV: Hossein Yassaie

Age: 56, born in Iran

Family: married with two daughters

Lives: in Buckinghamshire

Education: Gained a BSc and then PhD in electronics and communication engineering, Birmingham University.

Career: Worked at ST Microelectronics/Inmos on advanced computer processor development. In 1992 joined Imagination Technologies as technical director. Then in 1998 was appointed chief executive